PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Friday Night Movies 691

Dracula 3D is a 2012 Dario Argento film. The film was the first time Dario worked in 3D. We didn't see it in 3D but there didn't seem to be much of anything that would have made the 3D stand out. Dario co-wrote the script with producer Enrique Cerezo and writers Stefano Piani and Antonio Tentori. It adapts some of the Bram Stoker novel but makes up some shit of it's own.  The ever malleable vampire lore, huh.

Thomas Kretschmann plays Dracula and Rutger Hauer plays Van Helsing. I liked Rutger but I can't say I cared much for Thomas's Dracula. Interestingly, Thomas played Abraham Van Helsing in the 2013 Dracula TV series and Rutger played Dracula in the 2005 Dracula III: Legacy. I haven't seen either. It seems like there's always some Dracula stuff to be catching up on. Asia Argento is the only other cast member that I knew.

Johnathan Harker comes to the small village of Passo Borgo, to work for Count Dracula. Mina, Jonathan's wife, will arrive in a few days. Jonathan gets chomped on pretty quickly and Mina arrives with him supposedly in the city on an errand for the Count. Really, he's in a box in the dungeon, growing some teeth. Mina's friend Lucy is the daughter of the Mayor. The city officials have made a secret pact with the vampire, he helps the village financially for snacking rights and they do what he says. When they don't, there's no saving them from the vicious blood sucker. They would have been better off to kill the prick, right from the start, dead. No saving Lucy either, she's turned by a chomp on the back of the knee.

Late in the movie Van Helsing arrives and he spends the last half hour hunting down the vamps. The movie has a bit of the look and feel of a Hammer film and that was kind of fun. The script was mostly standard vampire stuff. The giant mantis was a surprise but the Dracula flies weren't. There's some nudity and splashes of blood. Sadly, the CGI was often a let down. It's the sort of stuff you expect to see on the SyFy channel, grey and unfinished. All told I doubt I would bother with it again. There's nothing special about it. That mantis was fucking weird.

Our second movie could have used a man sized mantis to liven it up. Sister Street Fighter: Fifth Level Fist is sometimes known as Sister Street Fighter 4 but it's not part of the series that spun off of the Sonny Chiba Street Fighter movies. It came out in 1976 and it was directed by Shigehiro Ozawa who had directed the Sonny Chiba Street Fighter films. It was his last film and sadly it's not as entertaining as the Sonny Chiba films.

A couple of gals get thrown into a fight to the death with some drug dealers who run a movie studio. There's a mix of talking and fighting. Some of the talking was dull and some of the fights were hard to see what was going on. I don't think it;s more than average and I'm pretty sure I'm not going to see it again.

Ten Little Indians 1974

I hadn't seen the 1974 adaptation of Agatha Christie's novel And Then There Were None before. Ten Little Indians is the US title of And Then There Were None. Harry Allan Towers is the producer, he adapted the novel for a 1965 film and again in 1989. I've seen the 1965 version and though it was OK.There's a 1945 version that is pretty good. I recently saw the BBC production of the book. Kind of gruesome and bleak. Good though.

The 1974 screenplay is by Erich Krohnke, Enrique Llovet and Harry writing under the name Peter Welbeck. The director is Peter Collinson. Peter directed the 1969 heist film The Italian Job. I've seen that but nothing that I remember of his other work.

The cast is pretty good: Charles Aznavour, Stephane Audran, Elke Sommer, Gert Frobe, Herbert Lom, Oliver Reed, Richard Attenborough, Maria Rohm, Alberto de Mendoza, Adolfo Celi and the voice of Orson Wells. The cast all get invited to a remote location where they are accused of murder by a voice on a record. Now they are to be punished. The killing starts soon after the accusations. One by one they get picked off until the killer is revealed. Once you've seen one version of the film you know what's going on. A good production is still fun to watch.

Instead of the island location in the book the setting is an old hotel in the middle of nowhere in Iran. The guests were helicoptered in and there were no vehicles there. The Iranian hotel is cool looking, it was abandoned but still usable. Parts of the film were also shot in Spain. Much of that is interesting ruins and desert. The 1965 Towers production was also set in a remote area, this time in snow covered mountains.

Glad I picked up a copy. I've been collecting Christie film and TV productions. There are a good number and many of them are fun to watch.

The Woods 2006

The Woods is a 2006 horror movie written by David Ross and directed by Lucky McKee. I'm no Lucky fan but I saw the cast included Bruce Campbell so I decided to put it on my Netflix DVD queue. Bruce is only in the movie a bit at the beginning and a bit at the end. He plays the father of the young woman who's being sent to the private school run by Patricia Clarkson. The school turns out to be a dangerous place. Patricia and the other teachers are cold and strict. They get worse, people start to get killed, then the trees come alive. A good reminder that the woods are a dangerous place. Don't go there. The movie was about average to me, kind of slow and draggy in the first half, it picks up near the end, once the trees get going. Not something that I would need to watch again.

Killing Hasselhoff 2017

The IMDb description of the movie is written by the film's writer, Peter Hoare.

A man in a high stakes celebrity death pool quickly loses everything - his business, his bank account, his home, his fiancé. He snaps, then realizes the only way to get his life back on track. He'll have to murder his own celebrity. He'll have to kill Hasselhoff.

The film's director is Darren Grant. Ken Jeong plays the man who wants to kill Hasselhoff. It's all yelling and slapstick from the start. I liked the ludicrousness of it all. It's not more than average but I got a few laughs and that was worth the effort.

Last Of The Summer Wine Series 1-5

I've watched the first 5 series of Last Of The Summer Wine since I got the complete set. I watch a couple here and there and I'm finding that I like the shows as much as the first time I saw them. The British DVD set that I have has the complete first series. Only three of the episodes from series 1 were on the US discs I saw from the library. There's a pilot, it's on the last British set so I'll watch it when I get there. Series 1 & 2 has the three guys above. Starting on the left we've got Cyril Blamire, played by Michael Bates, Compo Simmonite, played by Bill Owen, and Norman Clegg, played by Peter Sallis. Michael Bates would get cancer and leave after the second series.

Brian Wilde would join the show as Walter C "Foggy" Dewhurst, Cyril's old pal in the 3rd series. He used to know live in the town when he was younger, he'd been in the Army for many years. He's kind of pompous and annoying but the other two make fun of him at times. He comes up with some pretty ludicrous ideas for activities. It's a wonder that they don't break bones, the things they get up to.

The show is set in a pretty West Yorkshire town, played by Holmfirth, with plenty of picturesque countryside on the side. There's a nice mix of talking and physical comedy. It makes me laugh and the guys are fun to spend some time with.

Humanity And Paper Balloons 1937

I don't read many blogs anymore, they can suck a lot of time from your day, but I do read the Cagey Films Blog. I know the guy in Winnipeg who writes it and as the title might suggest, the blog features film reviews. Occasionally George mentions films I haven't seen and sometimes they're films I'm curious to see. I'm less interested in some of the dramas he posts about, that's just me. I will watch the occasional drama and I'm certainly more likely to watch a drama from a foreign country.

It's kind of rare for me to see a Japanese film from before WW2 and George's recent post on Japanese director Sadao Yamanaka sent me looking for the 3 films that are still available. They're all available on DVD but I checked on YouTube to see if I could see them right now. All are available with subtitles in copies that are watchable.

Humanity And Paper Balloons was the first one that I watched. The screenplay is by Shintaro Mimura and it's based on his play. It's the last film for director Sadao Yamanaka. Here's a bit from the IMDb Trivia Page.

The film's pessimistic tone offended the censors to the extent that the director lost his military exemption permit. Drafted as a common private the very day "Humanity and Paper Balloons" was released, Yamanaka died from dysentery in Manchuria a year later, aged 28.

It's a pretty sad story, set in an 18th century slum. A Ronin and a Hairdresser cross paths and go down in flames. It's a good reminder that feudal Japan sure sucked. I guess, it wasn't much better in 1937 either. Plenty of pointless deaths, all around.

The Ronin and the Hairdresser get mixed up with the local gang boss and his thugs. The hairdresser runs a gambling shop without tipping the boss. The Ronin is looking to see the boss and give him a letter. The Ronin's father knew the boss and the Ronin hopes to get a job with the letter. The Boss snubs him. The conflict grows worse and things get pretty dire for our main two guys. There's a lot of that sort of story element in samurai films. In the Zatoichi films he runs into citizens being oppressed by the local head man all the time. Plenty of small town boss's need killing in feudal Japan. They sure make life miserable for everyone. A good message to be learned.

I enjoyed it but I like these dire films set in feudal Japan. It's a drama but it's also a crime movie. You've got a local small time criminal and an honest guy who's pushed to his limit, up against the local crime boss. How often have you seen that?

Science Fiction Sunday 498

Air was the first disc I watched from the small stack from Netflix DVD. It's a 2015 movie about a couple of guys, Norman Reedus and Dijmon Hounsou, who are the maintenance men of a missile silo filled with frozen humans after the world fell apart and the atmosphere became unbreathable. There are supposed to be other silos and the maintenance men contact a network. Norman and Dijmon wake up every 6 months, do the activities on the print out, and pop back into hibernation. When the movie opens the guys have just popped out of their hibernation beds, things start to go wrong pretty quickly. It's a good reminder that important jobs should have more staff. This waking period is the one where the two guys go nuts. It doesn't go well for either of them. At least the hibernating people survived. It's barely average. I wouldn't need to see it again.

I watched Space Mutiny today, it's a 1988 film that I got from Netflix. It wasn't on my watched movie list but after watching a few minutes it was familiar. I'd seen it on Mystery Science Theater 3000 and never wrote down the title. I watched the whole thing anyway and kind of missed the crew from the Satellite of Love keeping me company. It's not that great a movie, that's for sure. It could use lots of nudity, better action scenes, a few jokes, some decent dialog, really anything to sass it up a bit. It scores a 2.1 on the IMDb so it could need a lot of help. The script is filled with stupid stuff, the acting is fair at best, often it's stinky, the effects and production values aren't there. That's a lot to help with, huh. Oh, well, another one that I wouldn't need to add to my collection then. I'll watch the MST3K version.

I watched ZPG and I was pretty sure I hadn't seen it before. It's got a screenplay by Max Ehrlich and Frank De Felitta with Michael Campus directing. It came out in 1972 and it was filmed in Copenhagen Denmark. Oliver Reed and Geraldine Chapman are the main leads. It's a pretty bleak future, the world is crowded with people, the air is bad, there are food rations, the government is oppressive. The countries of the world decide to put a stop to breeding for a 30 year period to slow down the population growth. The penalty for breeding is death. Geraldine has a kid with Oliver, they try to hide it and things go bad from there. They have trouble with their couple swapping friends, they want a baby even worse than Geraldine and Oliver, and then they don't get the child they rat the parents out. Still, even after they've been sealed in the execution chamber there's a possible positive ending for our couple. Sadly it's a bit of a slog to get there.

One interesting thing, at least to me, was that the robot babies and children were created by Derek Meddings. He worked for Gerry Anderson from the Torchy The Battery Boy days through the live action shows like UFO. He did effects on some James Bond and Superman films. I picked this movie up on a whim during the Kino Lorber DVD sale. Not the best pick that's for sure. I might never watch it again but I'll keep it anyway. There's a commentary with Steve Ryfle that was jammed with facts but rather dry. Steve is the author, with Ed Godziszewski, of the recent book on Ishiro Honda. I'm currently reading that and finding it to be highly entertaining.

Maigret And The St Fiacre Case 1959

Maigret And The St Fiacre Case is a 1959 French film with Jean Gabin as the French Detective. It's adapted from Georges Simenon's novel l'Affaire Saint-Fiacre. I have read some Maigret novels but can't say that I liked them enough to continue on with more than the 3-4 I did read. It might been poor translations but it was the writing that made me less interested, not the stories. Once again director Jean Delannoy writes the screenplay with Rodolphe-Maurice Arlaud and Michel Audiard. The Kino Lorber discs have nice looking copies of the movies but no extras. Most of their discs are rather bare bones. They have a nice bunch of movies in their catalog, much of which is what people would call Classic Movies.

Maigret travels to the countryside to visit his friend the Duchess of Saint-Fiacre. She had received a death threat letter and asked him to visit. Sure enough she dies a day or so later. It seems like a natural death but Maigret figures out she was murdered. He goes after the killer.

Did that guy Maigret's pointing do it? We'll find out by the end of the movie. The French countryside and small town were good locations and I enjoyed the local architecture. I was entertained by the story and was glad to have added the DVD to my stack.

Maigret Sets A Trap 1958

A week ago I watched the second of the french 1950s Maigret movies and thought it was entertaining. I got it from the library and until the DVD got picked up, and watched, I didn't realize that it was the second film with Jean Gabin as Inspector Maigret. I hadn't done any research at that point. I just pick things off the library new release list that look interesting. I'm not always pleased at what I get but there you go. Often the selection delivers an entertaining film or TV program. The library didn't have the first film and after watching the second I wanted to see the first. In one of those timing is everything kind of ways,  Kino Lorber was having one of their sales, $9.95 each, so I ordered both films. That's a fair saving, both films total $34.35 on Amazon right now. I like the drawn covers on this DVD and that's something I don't always like.

My order arrived this afternoon and I watched Maigret Sets A Trap. It's a 1958 French movie that's based on the Georges Simenon book. The screenplay is by Michel Audiard, Rodolphe-Maurice Arlaud and director Jean Delannoy.

Jean Gabin plays Inspector Maigret, that's him staring at Yvonne Maurin, played by Annie Girardot. The other lady is Lucienne Bogaert, playing Yvonne's mother-in-law Mme Veuve Adèle Maurin. Those two are quite a pair and you can't say anything much nice about the husband/son. Maigret is on the case of a serial killer who stabs and slashes brunettes. We follow him around as he visits the area where the murder happened, the police station, the apartments of the various suspects, and his own apartment where we meet Mrs Maigret.

I liked the movie, the story is interesting and it moves along briskly, especially for a 119 minute movie. I liked this Maigret and the other characters are interesting too. I know I'll want to watch this one again some day. I'll store it away until then.

 

Friday Night Movies 690

Our first movie was the new Nick Cage SF film, The Humanity Bureau. It's Canadian and came it earlier this year. Joe brought a copy from Netflix DVD, oddly enough I received the same movie from Netflix but didn't bring it. I was going to watch it for Science Fiction Sunday. No matter, there's too many more where that came from, I have two from Netflix sitting on the table to watch and there's endless misery on Amazon Prime. The Humanity Bureau is beaten with the misery stick and after a while I was sad I wasn't watching it at 1.5 speed.

Nick is a guy who's a "rising star" in the Humanity Bureau. He visits clients and evaluates their usefulness to the current regime. If they don't produce more than they consume they get packed off to New Eden. It's a resettlement location, people are sent there but no one hears from them again. So far they've sent 7 million people there. Nick learns on the current job that there's something going on with New Eden and there's truth be told. You can already see where this is going. He learns the truth and runs away with a woman and his son. The trio's backstory is a tedious bit of business. The Humanity Bureau sends men to chase Nick down and return him to the fold or kill him. There's lots of chasing in the desert. Then they chase him into Canada where it's nice. Sadly, even the nice bits didn't make the movie that entertaining. There were dull points between the chase and fight bits and I didn't like the characters much. The whole future world wasn't thought out too well. Since there was time to think between the more exciting bits there was time to complain about some of those ideas. I wouldn't recommend the movie. I'm certainly not going to bother with a copy for me, I don't need to see it again.

We had watched our next movie back in 2006 and I saw it again a couple years ago. Tonight we watched the new Code Red Blu-ray. It looks so much better than the Mill Creek copy we watched back 2006. I blogged about the movie on Friday Night Movies 51 March 21 2006. Here's that post with bad links removed and spelling corrected.

Messiah of Evil delivered more than 40 cents worth of entertainment. It was in color. And it was Technicolor, not the crappy lack-o-color Metrocolor like the previous movie. Willard Huyck, directed and wrote the screenplay. He also wrote both American Graffiti films, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Howard The Duck. So, you can see he's rather hit and miss, but I'm guessin' his royalty checks are whackin' huge. While no bullseye, it's certainly no miss either. There are some fun moments and some near creepy scenes. Most of the actors are veteran TV performers with a mixed level of talent. Elisha Cook Jr. and Royal Dano are the big names with tiny parts.  Director Walter Hill has an unnamed part. If I ever watch it again I'll try to remember to keep an eye out.

A young woman comes to the town of Point Dune looking for her father. He's not home. He's left a journal that tells a Lovecraftian type story of supernatural beings and their strange powers. The townspeople are flesh eaters that like a nice stare down on the beach. It's where they go every night, waiting, staring out to sea, waiting for the stranger to emerge from it's watery depths. I'd rather have a lay in. In bed. Where it's dry. The daughter meets up with a Euroguy and his two gal pals. There's a lot of beds involved but sadly no nudity. Euroguy is looking for the father too. They all stay at the father's beach house mixing a dash of soap opera with violent death. There is a fun scene in the movie house. Most of the horror scenes are fun, much more so than the drama or soap scenes. Most everyone dies and it has a Lovecraft type end that reveals the daughter to be in a mental hospital. She sits and paints now. Nice. Stay out of towns that have that much evil in them. You'd think you'd be able to smell evil like that. It would put a stank on the town.

Needless to say I didn't keep an eye out for Walter Hill. Nothing to worry about. I probably didn't care for the movie as much as I did before but I still gave it a 6 on the IMDb. It gets a 6.6 but I didn't think I could give it a 7. It's not that good.